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AN 



ORATION 



BEFORE THE 



CITY AUTIIOKITIES OF BOSTON, 



FOURTH OF JULY, 1870. 



By WILLIAM EVERETT. 




BOSTON: 

ALFEED MUDGE & SQN, CITY PRINTERS, 34 SCHOOL STREET. 
1870. 



AN 



ORATION 



BEFORE THE 



CITY AUTHOEITIES OF BOSTON, 



FOURTH OF JULY, 1870. 



By WILLIAM EVERETT^ I % 3 ^ - 





BOSTON: 

ALFRED MUDGE & SON, CITY PRINTERS, 34 SCHOOL STREET. 
1870. 






K 



«?> 



CITY OF BOSTON. 



In Board op Aldermen, July 18, 1870. 

Ordered, That the thanks of this Board be presented to 
William Everett, Esquire, for his eloquent and appropriate 
Address before the City Government and Citizens of Boston, on 
the occasion of the ninety-fourth Anniversary of the Declaration 
of American Independence ; and that he be requested to furnish 
a copy of the Address for publication by the City. 

Passed. 

S. F. McCLEARY, 

City Clerk. 

Approved, 18th July, 1870. 

NATHANIEL B. SHURTLEFF, 

Mayor. 



ORATION. 



Mr. Mayor AND Fellow-Citizens of Boston: 

It is, I assure you, with no slight diffidence that 
I approach the honorable task Avhich the Committee 
of Arrangements imposes on me. The mere recital 
of the names of the distinguished men who have 
preceded me in the list of annual orators is enough 
to make any man feel the distinction as well as the 
labor of this duty. This list is not short; for a 
hundred successive years has the vote of the town 
or city government chosen an orator to speak before 
them on a great public anniversary. 

In the year 1771, it was voted that an oration be 
delivered on the Fifth of March, in commemoration 
of the so-called Massacre — the first collision of 
British troops and American citizens — in the pre- 
vious year; and James Lovell, the master of the 
Boston Latin School, was chosen to deliver it. A 
wise choice; for no man can be better prepared to 
trace with accuracy the distresses and duties of 



6 .TTTLY 4, 1R70. 

nations, or express them with elegance; and precision, 
than he whose daily duty it is to train the youth of 
his native town in the language, the literature and 
the history of the wondrous peoples of antiquity. 

Thirteen orations were deUvered on this anni- 
versary. When in 1783 the treaty between England 
and the United States had set the first seal on the 
independence of the latter, it was voted, on motion, 
I believe, of James Otis, that the annual Boston ora- 
tion should be on the Fourth of July. Dr. John 
"Warren, an honored name and title, never, it should 
seem, to die out among us, accordingly performed 
this duty in 1783. It is noAV, therefore, the hundredth 
year of the celebration, and I am the hundred and 
first orator to address his fellow-citizens of Boston. 

My distinguished predecessor, whom we all value 
for his practical wisdom as much as his attic wit, has 
told us 

" Little of all we value here 
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year, 
Without both feeling and looking queer; " 

an axiom which some antiquaries in England attempt 
to carry still further, by asserting that no man is 
properly authenticated as having lived to be a hun- 
dred years old ; and certainly there is a strong feeling 
in our community that anything which has existed 



ORATION. 7 

for a hundred years has got to show cause why this 
lease for three lives should be renewed. The old- 
world prepossession in favor of antiquity has very 
little hold now upon us; we care for little that has 
not modern improvements attached to it ; — and after 
tinkering away on the Fourth of July celebrations to 
get them as close to modern ideas as possible, the 
public has begun to hear a murmu.^ creep through it, 
that the old house had better be pulled down alto- 
gether; — or to drop metaphor and take up slang, 
that the " Fourth of July is played out." I would 
not quote these words before this audience to defend 
them ; — but they are said, and no one will pretend 
that the day is observed with the same enthusiasm 
that it was twenty, thirty, or forty years ago. 

This might be laid to the charge of the hot wea- 
ther. In changing the season of our annual celebra- 
tion from March to July, we certainly have not gained 
much in comfort — and doubtless many persons find 
a great open-air celebration oppressive in the heats of 
summer. But if the Fourth of July is really ceasing 
to excite an annual enthusiasm, it is not because the 
thermometer stands at S5^y or because we hear the 
waves beating cool on the rocks at I^ahant. The 
Parisians crowd as eagerly as ever to the fete of 
Bonaparte on the 15th of August. Is it true, that 



8 J U L Y 4 , 1 8 7 . 

the Yulg'ar ]^liraso T qnotecT to jou involves a fact? 
that the celebration of the Fonrth of Jnl}^ is merely 
a piece of stage pageantry, a play of which the actors 
and andience are alike thoroughly wear}^? When 
George the Foni'th was crowned, the pageant of the 
Coronation gave snch general delight, that it was put 
as a spectacle on the stage of Drnry Lane theatre. 
Here it was cojjied with snch accurate magnificence 
that Elliston, who performed the King, was always 
so intoxicated — with his part — as to bless his as- 
sembled people with tearful solemnity, and it would 
have been hard for the most cautious observer of 
palace and theatre in 1821 to say which was the real, 
and Avhich was the stage King. But nations are 
waking uj) to the belief that such sjoectacles are fit 
for the stage alone ; that when we go out from the 
doors of the theatre to real life, we must stop all 
plays, and purge everything in the nature of .a pag- 
eant from actual government. Can it then be, that 
we, who wonder why England is so patient with her 
monarch and her peers, have been in reality prolong- 
ing to a decrepit old age a mimic enthusiasm for 
certain old-world events, whose real significance was 
exhausted a. generation ago? I propose to give this 
hour to a consideration of the question; and if our 
answer is " yes " — then let this be the last speech that 



ORATION. 9 

ends the fifth ' act of the hundred years' pageantrj-, 
and the fireworks to-night close the transformation 
scene of the empty spectacle. 

One hundred years ! Let us try to realize, fellow- 
citizens, the immense distance there is between the 
thoughts that might fairly occu23y an orator in 1771, 
and those that now rise instinctively to his mind. 
The orations for the first thirteen years were deliv- 
ei-ed in commemoration of the Boston Massacre of 
1770. That singular event was much in the minds 
of all men in both Europe and America. It was the 
first armed collision between the colonies and the 
mother country; has been considered by many to 
contain the germ of the Declaration of Independ- 
ence; and was well calculated to make such careful 
observers as Horace Walpole tremble for its effect 
on national feelings, l^o more striking event for an 
orator a hundred years ago than the danger of sepa- 
ration between East and West. 

A hundred years pass, — and is there a more 
striking event for an orator than the marvellous 
union of east and west by the Ocean Telegraph and 
the Pacific Kailroads? Suppose another collision 
between English and Americans in the streets of Bos- 
ton to-day. They could get word across the ocean, 
and we across the continent, each in an instant of 



10 JULY 4, IS 70. 

time; but our succors would be at liand from San 
Francisco long before theirs could arrive from Lon- 
don. I look upon this absolute trampling down the 
barriers of material nature as an event worthy to close 
the American century which appeared to begin with 
the breaking of the ties of blood and nationality. 

But I can bring before you the lapse of a century 
perhaps more vividly in another way. There is no 
better way of noting this lapse than by the lives of 
men. Towards the end of the year 1770 died 
George Grenville, the first Bi'itish minister who 
ever conceived the idea of taxing the American col- 
onies. It was but about eight years since he had 
first been the responsible author of any measures of 
state. But as the inventor of the stamp act, he had 
succeeded in making himself utterly odious to the 
colonies, and when, not very long before the first of 
these orations, the news of his death would be fully 
understood all over America, many a man would say, 
" But for him, we might have been as good friends 
as ever with England." 

And now, fellow-citizens, our newspapers have 
hardly got done with commemoration of the death of 
that son of England whose name is best known to 
Americans of all the hordes that acknowledge her 
sway. It may be that in truth we hold to the opinion 



ORATION. 11 

of Carlyle, who wrote many years ago that "the 
British islands were inhabited by something like 20,- 
000,000 of men, women and children, mostly fools." 
But as long as Charles Dickens lived, we could not, 
for his sake, hate England altogether. The expres- 
sions of sorrow for his death, which, beginning from 
the j)al'ice, were echoed throughout the length and 
breadth of England, were as much exceeded here as 
our land is larger than hers. The few fanatical 
hands that soug-ht to flins" a nettle instead of a 
rose on his bier were indignantly and contemptu- 
ously beaten down. ]!*^ay more, those jests and 
criticisms on America, which in other Englishmen 
are an ofience, we positively refuse to take in ill-part 
from him, and so as the hundred years close, Ave felt 
that all the hated names of generations, — Gren- 
villes and Gages and Burgoynes — Tarletons and 
Brokes and Pakenhams — the cold friend and the 
noisy foe, the Lords of the Council, and the liairds 
of the Dockyard, have not done so much by their 
nnited efforts to keep the countries apart, as Dickens 
and Longfellow to keep them together. l^or am I 
claiming too much for our revolution and the pro- 
gress it has caused in the world, when I say this, 
that but for the resistance inaugurated here, in favor 
of a new order of things, as against the old tradi- 



12 JULY 4, 18 70. 

tions of Eiiglaiul, — a new ordei- hardly better com- 
prehended by our iriends like Burke and Chatham, 
than by our enemies like Grenville and IS^orth — but 
for the revolution, I say, of America in 1770, it 
would not have been physically possible, not morally 
conceivable that in England, in 1870, the tears of 
Queen, Lords and Commons should have been 
min gled over the grave of such a writer as Charles 
Dickens. 

For this century — the century between the Boston 
Massacre and the Pacific Railroad — between George 
Grenville and Charles Dickens — is l)ut the history 
of the development of that idea which first seemed 
to flash into men's minds with the snap of the British 
firelocks on the Fifth of Marcli, and first took authori- 
tative form on the Fourth of July — the nationality 
of America. In. these hundred years, this great con- 
ception has not been gathering growth uniformly, 
but by successive stages or crises. And I wish to 
call your attention to these culminating points in the 
nation's progress, and if possible, to deduce from 
theii- history three important truths. 

1st. That the Declaration of Independence con- 
tains the hint, at least, of all the successive develop- 
ments of our nationality. 

2d. That at every stage something has been left 



ORATION. Id 

incomplete, which a wise nation will be continually 
taking np and perfecting. 

3d. That this process of development is not at an 
end; the truths of the Declaration not being, as yet, 
worked out. 

And, fellow-citizens, if I can succeed, even par- 
tially, in showing this, then the Fourth of July is 
not "played out" — then the annual orator has still 
something to talk about, something to praise, some- 
thing to note, something to counsel, — then Ave are 
not enacting a pageant, but doing a great work, • 
whereon we may well, like our fathers, " mutually 
pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our 
sacred honor." 

This nationality of ours, then, seems to me like a 
tidal wave, passing in majesty over the century, and 
cresting in successive billows, as one or another 
thought, mightier than the rest, assumes a definite 
shape, and rises and breaks in grandeur and beauty. 
The first of these crests, if you will let me so call 
them — the first great thought which exhibits itself 
as a great fact, is the assertion of our independence 
as a nation. The full establishment of this great 
fact occupies the whole space from 1770 to 1783, the 
first thirteen years of our Boston orations. ]^ot till 
the original antagonist, whose first armed collision 



\4z ' JULY 4, 18 70. 

with US was seen in these streets a hundred years 
aii'o, threw down lier sword, and acknowledged 
her defeat, was it right that our celebration day 
should be changed to the Fourth of July. The 
spirit that arose in 1770 was struggling for six years 
with all the associations, the traditions, the affections 
of the past, with all the doubts and fears for the 
future. At last, the internal agony could be borne 
no longer — the Declaration of Independence was 
wrung by main force from the heart of tlie people. 
Six more years, however, were needed to establish 
the fjict, — and ovevy hour of those six years — every 
victory, every defeat, every alliance welded, every 
intrigue foiled, even Lee's braggadocio and Arnold's 
treachery did its part to establish it beyond all 
question, in the minds not only of Englishmen, but 
of every other nation, that we are a people like them. 
They greatly err, it seems to me, who would make 
the Declaration of Independence the sole determining 
element in this great series of events. As the formal 
expression of the people's will, it was most essential, 

as the cr}" forced from their heart it is most 

touching, — but I feel that its true significance has 

been misinterpreted, when the declaration is made 

synonymous with the establishment of independence. 

From 1783 we are a nation like others. Whatever 



ORATION. 15 

they may do, a's the Declaration says, we may do — 
we are one in the great commonwealth of peoples — 
we are sharers and contributors in the great world 
stock of art, literature and science ; we are bound by 
all the precepts, and may claim all the benefits of 
that glorious system of rights and duties, the work 
of the first intellects of the world, that is known as 
the law of nations. How concisely is this last truth 
expressed in that last clause of the Declaration, when 
it asserts that we shall hold Englishmen, as all other 
nations, " to be enemies in Avar, in peace, friends." 
A fit rebuke to that miserable policy — too often fos- 
tered and defended among us — which would make us 
not independent among nations, but isolated from 
them, which teaches that Americans should look on 
every other country with suspicion and contempt, — 
and which, refusing to cultivate a single friendshij) in 
peace, may find itself at last without one ally in war. 
The second crest in our national wave was the 
consolidation of the country by the adoption of the 
Constitution. The Declaration of Independence was 
formed by the delegates of the United States, — as 
the United States, they asserted their right to an 
equal place among the nations of the earth, — as 
the United States they entered into an alliance 
with France and Spain, and ultimately wrung the 



IG JULY 4, 18 70. 

acknowledgment of their nationality from England. 
The Articles of Confederation and Pe]i)etnal Union — 
mark that word pei'petual — asserted no ncAv i)iin- 
ciple, — they merely attempted to give form to that 
which already existed, and the Constitution of the 
United States, ordained and established in order to 
form a more perfect Union, is, as that very phrase 
declares, not the act which made a people one, but 
the act of a people already one. That we are as we 
are, may be the work of the Constitution ; but that we 
are what we ai-e, is the Avork of the Declaration. The 
restrictions, the barriers, the guards of the Articles 
of Confederation would be like the fallen trunks that 
impede and perplex the navigation of the Mississippi. 
The grave enactments of the Constitution are as the 
stately levees, which, while they prevent the destruc- 
tive exuberance of the glorious current, only direct 
and further the sweep of its imperial progress to the 
sea. Once more, that solemn and pregnant assertion 
of the Fourth of July that the United States have 
the right to do anything which free and inde- 
pendent states ought to do, contains full au- 
thority for every word in that marvellous 
instrument of 1787, Avhich carries throughout the 
length and breadth of the land a supreme authority 
and absolute sway, gi-eater in its direct expression 



ORATION. 17 

of national will than was ever vouchsafed, in their 
highest pitch of power, to the edicts of Alexander, 
the decrees of the Roman Senate, or the acts of 
the august Parliament of Britain. So strangely, so 
providentially has the simple, logical, legitimate inter- 
pretation of the Constitution surpassed and defeated 
the hopes and fears of all who saw its birth. For not 
Patrick Henry, who thought it did too much, nor 
Hamilton, Avho thought it did too little, nor Madison, 
who believed it had just hit the happy medium, had 
any conception of its legitimate development — and 
I would say to all " strict constructionists," the 
untimely brood of a dead and gone generation, who 
can see nothing in the Constitution but what they 
read in Elliott's Debates, that they can no more stop 
the evolution from it of a centralized, consolidated, 
imperial government, above, beneath, beyond all state 
sovereigiit}^, than the Indians along the Kepublican 
Fork can stop the engines of the Pacific railroad by 
putting red clay pipe-heads on the track. 

The next great step in the progress of our nation- 
ality is the extension of the authority of the Consti- 
tution and the principles of the Declaration beyond 
the territory originally included in the colonies of 
Europe. The progress has been so gradual, the 
States have grown up so systematically from East 



18 JULY 4, 1870. 

to West, that we are apt to overlook what an 
entirely (HHcrent process is the growth of onr 
territoiy beyond the Rocky Mountains, from 
anything which has happened to the east of them. 
It was a great step to cross the Appalachian range 
and found Kentucky and Tennessee; it was a great 
step to leap the Ohio, and plant the new, free life of 
Illinois and Wisconsin. It was a still more daring 
feat, it was in the opinion of our ancestors unconsti- 
tutional, to acquire Louisiana and Floi'ida by pur- 
chase. But all these States were within the range of 
the original English colonists, or within that of the 
original French colonists, whose power I'ell seven 
years before the century we are considering, — or, 
in the extreme case, had received European civiliza- 
tion as soon as ourselves, or even sooner. But in 
extending the genius of our government to the 
regions on the Pacific coast, we are entering upon 
a land unknown even to the nations of Europe in 
1776. In the maps published by geographers of 
authority in the middle of the last century, the whole 
northern part of America is laid down with a wild- 
ness of speculation which reminds one of Chinese or 
Arabic science. In this same year 1770, from which 
I date my subject, I find recorded the death of Capt. 
Christopher Middleton, who received the Royal So- 



ORATION. 19 . 

ciety's Medal for his explorations in the Arctic Seas. 
But Captain Middleton had been sent in 1742 to 
explore a northwest passage from Hudson's Bay to 
the South Sea, and it was evidently expected that it 
would be but the journey of a few days from ocean 
to ocean in latitude 60"^. It was not till Washing- 
ton's first administration was drawing to its close, that 
Capt. Robert Gray of Boston discovered the Columbia 
River, nor till twelve years after that it was reached 
overland. In two generations we have California and 
Oregon entering the Union as states, ^ow here, fel- 
low-citizens, we have a new idea, — a new element in 
the national life. All the previous additions to the old 
thirteen, however different in their history, their soil, 
or the genius of their first settlers, yet looked more 
or less to the towns on the Atlantic seaboard for the 
full development of their resources, ^o matter what 
authority they might claim in virtue of the unheard- 
of stream of agricultural and mineral wealth which 
they were destined to pour upon the old world, — 
as long as the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence run 
eastward, they must still look to the Atlantic ports 
as the channels through which that abundance 
should flow, and everything that the old world could • 
give them in exchange must come across that same 
Atlantic ocean, which throughout its expanse is the 
true Mediterranean or connector of the lands. 



20 JULY 4, 18 70. 

And it is not only as a medium of commerce, not 
only to carry out its native Avealth and bring back its 
acquired luxuries, tbat tbe sea and the coast are 
needed by a great inland country like ours. Xo, nor 
yet for that other marvellous influence which only 
the sea imparts from its rocks and beaches, that 
strange health-giving force which comes from 
salt air and salt water alone, above the purest 
inspiration of the mountain, and the deepest 
rest of the plains. There is a nobler power 
yet, which the sea, and nothing but the sea, breathes 
into the heart of a nation. The mountaineer learns 
the austerer virtues, which are apt to Avither at the 
first touch of civilization, and the selfish indepen- 
dence which bids every other nation stand oft'; — the 
inhabitant of the plains learns to accumulate wealth, 
with that sort of fair-weather enterprise which tends 
only to foster prosperity, and ends in sluggish con- 
tent. But it is the sea-kings and their descendants 
alone, who enjoy the freest liberty in a genial inter- 
course with every land, who tear their golden 
treasures from the caves and floods of the barren 
main, who make a sport of danger and a mock of 
difficulty, whose messengers are winds, and the 
flames of fire their ministers. We children of tide- 
water, who draAV in the ocean with every breath, can 



ORATION. 21 

hardly appreciate what a blessing we enjoy above 
those who live far removed from it. I was told by 
one of onr own lamented dead, who marched with 
Sherman to the sea, that some of the Western men 
on arriving at the shore stooped down and drank the 
water, of which the taste rather staggered them. 
I fear physical geography was neglected in their 
school. But another Western man, worth all Sher- 
man's army put together, — I mean President Lin- 
coln, — told me with his own lips in 1863, that he 
longed to stay a while at the sea-shore, for he had 
never seen the sea in his life, except hastily from the 
windows of a railroad car. As he said it, that wild, 
sweet, unearthly look of melancholy that he too often 
wore, played across his rugged features, softening 
them to more than woman's tenderness, and he 
seemed to say like a man who resembled him in 
nothing but a love of liberty, and the abuse he got 
for it, — 

" I could lie down like a tired child 

And weep away the life of care 
Which I have borne, and yet must bear, 

Till death like sleep should steal an me, 
And I might feel in the warm air 

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea 
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony." 

Oh why was he not spared to us one summer more, 
that we might show him the sea? How all our coast 



22 JULY 4, 1870. 

would have risen like one man to gi-eet him I How 
all the Lincolns in Ilingham would have fought to 
be the first to get him, and the last to part with him! 
How we should have waked his child-like mirth to 
tenfold peals of laughter at the sports and stories of 
the sea-shore ! How the old fishermen and sailors 
would have crowded round to welcome the rugged 
Westerner that was so like themselves — how we 
would.have laid before him all the treasures of beach 
and rock, the wonders of fortress and beacon, how 
we would have blown away the cares and miseries of 
four wretched years with one whiif of an incoming 
tide! How we would have sent him back again to 
tell his own rich valleys, where nature seems to have 
outdone all her exploits of fertility, that after all 
there were no hearts and hands like the coastmen's 
in ^ew England! 

^ow this mighty influence of the sea, which all his- 
tory tells us has such an efiect on nations, our AYestern 
brethren had for years to seek fi'om us. They were 
obliged to descend to the coast of the same water 
that. bore the ships of King Athelstane, of Rollo, of 
Columbus, of Philip. But when Oregon and Cal- 
ifornia came into our family of States, a western 
coast, a coast all their own, was spread before them, 
and an ocean highway whose like Athelstane and 



ORATION. 23 

Columbus never knew, l^o longer need they look 
eastward for the treasures of India or China or 
Japan. It is Europe and we that must receive these 
treasures from them. No longer do they need to 
learn of us the enterprise, the liberty, the gene- 
rosity of the sea-kings; their own glorious ocean, 
their own peaceful sea, exempts them forever from 
such dependence. Truly, fellow-citizens, a mighty 
step in national progress. 

The next crest in the wave of our nationality is 
but too well known to all of us. Then it was that 
noxious seaweeds floated to the surface, and 
tinged the flood of an angry crimson dye. I 
propose now to say but few words on the two great 
additions made to our national experience in the last 
ten years, viz : — The maintenance by force of arms 
of the country's unity, and the emancipation of the 
negroes by the proclamation of the executive. Speak- 
ing with the hesitation which becomes a young man 
in the presence of those to whom the problems of 
Constitutional law were familiar before his birth, I 
shall venture to propound a view which would seem 
capable of determining these two questions with 
greater simplicity and completeness than more elabo- 
rate theories. The Declaration of Independence 
which we have heard read, — is it a mere rhetorical 



24 JULY 4, 1870. 

iiourish? is it a mere manifesto? is it only another 
way of saying, ^' Let us fight this question of Re- 
bellion out"? ^N^ot so, every true American answers; 
it is a state paper of the greatest significance, in 
which some exceptionable phrases are overcome by 
the weight of the matter. Yes;'*but what kind of a 
state paper? Was it merely like the letters which a 
secretary of state writes to a foreign minister, to 
explain or defend something in the conduct of him- 
self or another official? or has it in some way a 
binding force beyond the temporary occasion? I 
believe a document of such a character, creating and 
moving a nation as it did, brought before the world 
with every possible formality by the unanimous vote 
of the representative body of the nation, and ac- 
cepted by all successive generations as the authoi-- 
itative exposition of the popular will, can be regarded 
in no other light than as an exposition, in accordance 
with that will, of the great principles of organic law. 
And if so, then no organic or statute law that con- 
travenes it can in principle be legal; and none that 
clearly furthers it can in principle be illegal, l^o 
stream can rise higher than its fountain. Xo articles 
of confederation, or constitution, or treaties, or acts, 
or ordinances, can claim to express the sense of the 
nation more directly than the original charter which 
set the whole in motion. 



ORATION. 25 

Let us apply this principle to secession and eman- 
cipation. The declaration begins by recognizing the 
possibility of inevitable separation between States, — 
and it asserts also the necessity of a decent state- 
ment of the impelling causes in the face of the world, 
as also the duty of patient remonstrance before ap- 
pealing to arms. JS'ow, fellow-citizens, consider the 
actual history of the secession, consider that instead 
of anything like patient remonstrance we had san- 
guinary threats and abuse, and that when the so- 
called fatal hour came, so far from any statement of 
reasons out of decent respect to mankind, on the part 
of the unanimous representatives of the Southern 
people, half-a-dozen men, without rhyme or reason, 
said " we 'I'e ofi\ " Can we resist the conclusion, that 
such an act of separation is not only not recognized 
but is absolutely disowned by the signers of the Dec- 
laration, and that consequently the government and 
people of that nation which the Declaration created 
are in duty bound to see in it only a wilful rebellion, 
and as such to treat it, in virtue of that clause in our 
great charter which claims that the United States 
may do everything which sovereign and independent 
States of right ought to do? 

And so for the emancipation. I have heard good 
men, and wise men, express every variety of opin- 



26 .7 U I. Y 4 , 1 8 7 . 

ion about it. I have heard some coiuleiiiu it as 
unconstitutional; others defend it, as a military 
necessity; and others again praise it, as a noble 
casting aside of legal shackles, and an assertion of 
the great principles of man's rights. Yes, but not a 
new assertion, nor an illegal one. It is asserted in 
the Declaration of Independence that all men are 
created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with 
the rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness; 
and asserted not as a Utopian theory, not as a phil- 
anthropic challenge, but as a solemn decree of the 
people of the United States, in the veiy birth-hour of 
their national existence, and through the mouth of 
their authorized representatives. The emancijjation 
proclamation therefore Avas simply the carrying out 
of the dictum of an original charter; none the less 
organic law, because subsequent restrictive enact- 
ment had checked its legitimate operation. It was a 
return to old principles, not an assertion of new ones; 
it was Law and not Theory. 

The latest step in our national progress is that 
which I named as the great event to close the cen- 
tury, — the establishing of a speedy means of commu- 
nication between the extremities of the country. The 
Pacific Kailroad is needed if the country is to be the 
United States. Think, fellow-citizens, if we had had 



ORATION. 27 

that railroad lii 1861, how it would have relieved niy 
sainted predecessor, Starr King, in his almost single- 
handed fight that kept California for the nation, and 
took him from it. I regard this connection as just 
as essentially involved in the Declaration as the battle 
of Saratoga, or the treaty of 1783. If we are to be the 
United States, I say again, we must be united. If 
we are to be independent of the rest of the world, 
we must' hold together ourselves. I do not know 
what Political Economy may prove next, as to the 
right of Government to help a railroad; pretty soon 
I expect to hear that it has no right to build a light- 
house. But I am certain of this, that if Congress is 
to have members from the Pacific States, it must 
give them means to get to the Atlantic, or very soon 
they will cease to legislate in a pacific spirit. There 
were those who prophesied that the admission of 
California in 1850 meant a separate nation on that 
shore. I firmly believe that the Pacific Kailroad, as 
it closes this century which opened in 1770 with a 
threat of separation, is an assurance that the 
century of '76 will go by many times without see- 
ing another declaration of independence within the 
borders of the United States. 

I have thus attempted, fellow-citizens, to sketch 
the most important steps in our national progress 



28 JULY4,1S70. 

during the century since the national independence 
first ajDpeared inevitable. I do not mean to say this 
list would be everywhere agreed to. But I do say 
that these great events, the establishment of our 
nationality; the defining of our organic law; the 
extension of its authority over lands not included in 
our original limits, and ultimately over those undis- 
covered in 1770, and finding their national outlet in 
another ocean; the defence by arms of our national 
authority at home ; the emancipation of the African 
race, and finally, the physical uniting of all parts of 
the country, must be allowed by all to be at least the 
most important of the great crises in our history. 
]^ow, fellow-citizens, if I have succeeded in making 
my meaning clear to you, you will see in all these 
steps the great truths I named at the outset, and 
first, that they all derive their vitality from tlie 
original impulse given, the original energy breathed 
by the Declaration of Independence, which created 
the United States, endowed them with every attri- 
bute of national authority, and laid down the 
organic laws under which that power should be 
swayed, and hence the declai-ation is not " played 
out" but is as alive and real to-day as ever. I think 
I may safely rest this here. 

But, you will remember, I asserted that these sue- 



ORATION. 29 

cessive devetopments and evolutions of the princi- 
ples of 1776 had not yet come to an end; that at 
every step something had been left undone, and that 
there were yet greater things for the Declaration to 
ejBPect before it could have its perfect work. I have 
not the time to elaborate the first of these propositions 
at length — nor is it necessary ; for it is apparent to 
every man that there have always been at least 
two causes at work from the very foundation of 
the government to prevent the true carrying out of 
our great destiny. The first is that strange love of 
restriction, which has constantly fi-om time to time 
appeared, tending to hamper independence, to ham- 
per the confederation, to hamper the Constitution, 
to hamper every session of Congress since Congress 
was, with a fear, that this, or that, or the other was 
not within the powers of whatever was then the 
highest authority. Occasionally, the party that holds 
this view has actually succeeded in making some of 
their restrictions authoritative; but always have they 
been swept away by the advancing genius of the 
Declaration ; and, I trust, the time is not far distant, 
when it will be thoroughly recognized by constitu- 
tional lawyers that the very small number of restric- 
tions placed upon the powers of the general govern- 
ment by the Constitution, is, in reality, to prevent 



30 JULY 4, 18 70. 

still more serious restrictions being laid on the pul)lic 
liberty; and that the genius of the entire instrument, 
in obedience to that of the Declaration, is not restric- 
tive, but encouraging, clothing Congress with power, 
not stripping it, and bidding the nation go on, and do 
all that a nation of right may do. 

The second cause why, at each stage of our pro- 
gress, we have not done our entire work, is from that 
thought so deeply enrooted in the American heart, 
that we must " go ahead " — that if the nation makes 
progress, it is enough; and, in truth, if to advance 
were all, if to clear away the wilderness were the 
sum of national duty, we might well be satisfied. I 
have endeavored to point out the stages of progress 
of a century. 'No other nation ever went so for 
ahead in twice the period. But how have we done 
the work? Have Ave planted the wilderness that 
we have cleared? Have we always seen to it 
that it should not relapse into wildness ? Alas, too 
often not ! You are familiar with the heedless waste 
of land practised hitherto in many of our Southern 
States. Virgin soil has been tilled without rotation 
or manuring, till it could be tilled no more, and then 
it has been abandoned for other virgin soil, and this 
exhaustive practice has been repeated ad infini^ 
turn. I^ow this is only a type of what has been 



ORATION. 31 

done throng-liont the country, and throughout the 
century, in almost every part of the work. An 
immensity has been half done, very little thoroughly 
done. It is time to stop this; — it is time to 
add to our faith virtue; that is, not merely to 
go on, and on, and on, but to detail at least one- 
half the nation's strength to perfect, while the 
other is advancing; to see that we are content with 
no make-shifts, no temporary expedients, but that 
all our national work is of the best. And here it 
is that I find a most noble and ever-extending field 
for the energies of our own section, and our own 
city. It is for ]N'ew England, it is for Boston, the 
oldest, the best trained, the most experienced part of 
the country, to carry out to perfection the ideas which 
others initiate. It is in vain for us to attempt to 
keep progress with our brethren of San Francisco 
or Des Moines in the matter of going ahead ; but we 
may beat them out of the field in the ai't of perfect- 
ing half-done work. "Well and nobly did we dis- 
charge our duty as pioneers when that ivas our duty, 
and when thoroughness of detail, and stability of 
performance, resulting from higher education and 
closer competition, were to be found in Europe alone. 
^N'ow that the advanced guard has moved westward, 
it is theirs to pioneer, ours to perfect. ^N'or let 



32 JULY 4, 18 70. 



either them or us despise this duty. In the great 
work of rearing* the nation's edifice, remember that 

" 'Tis not timber, lead, and stone 
The architect requires alone 

To linish a fine building; 
The structure were but half complete, 
If he could possiblj' forget 
The carving and the gilding." 



Now this same carving and gilding must include 
everything that is demanded by elegance, refinement 
and comfort; by all the tenderer and delicate emo- 
tions; everything which makes our life worth more 
than Daniel Boone's or Red Jacket's. I need not 
name all the points in which Boston might aspire to 
control the world in this direction; but one, I will. 
It is the duty of Boston to see that her places of 
education are something besides schools; that she 
teaches something more than what are called, in de- 
rision I suppose, useful branches; for they are of no 
use except for the one lowest ambition; they may 
teach one how to make money, but they can teach 
him neither to be contented in its absence, nor happy 
in its use. Boston, as the head of the older states, 
must bring up her chikb'en to a thorough, lofty, deep 
and refined knowledge in every department of science, 
literature, history and art, without which all the 
poAver in the Avorld makes men mere tigers, and all 
the wealth in the world assimilates them to swine. 



ORATION. 33 

For these reasons, we may say that the work of 
the Declaration is not exhausted ; that its celebration 
is not played out. But there is one more great truth 
I alluded to, namely, that at least one more stage 
must come in its legitimate development, before 
its work is over. I have hinted it before : it is 
for America to understand and assume her true posi- 
tion as a member of the commonwealth of nations. 
Almost simultaneous with the completion of the Pa- 
cific railroad is the doubling of our telegraphic com- 
munication with Europe, and its extension to India ; 
and soon we shall see a belt of telegraph entirely 
around the world. As we are thus brought physi- 
cally nearer the other nations, I trust we shall be 
brought morally nearer to them, that we shall give 
up the selfish, exclusive, repellent feeling which we 
call independent and American, and know that all 
nations form one brotherhood. 

It cannot, I think, be denied, that such a feeling 
does very largely exist, — a feeling that as we are 
on another continent, so we are on another world. 
It is easy to see its origin. As colonies we knew 
Europe only through England. America-'s greatest 
friends and lovers, men like Chatham and Burke, who 
attacked the measures of the Ministry as legally 
or morally wrong, always seemed to maintain that 



34 JULY 4, 1870. 

through England alone the colonies ought to com- 
municate with the world. Naturally, then, Amer- 
icans came to believe that the Declaration separated 
them, cut them adrift, cast them oil' from England, 
Europe, the Avorld, and left them to work out the 
problem of national duty in isolation. 

Hence arises that strange feeling which makes so 
many Americans visit the whole of Europe as they* 
visit the buried cities near ^Naples; as a sort of 
enormous Pompeii, where a kindly interposition of 
Providence has entirely destroyed all real life, and 
left a variety of national and social relics as in a 
museum, whei e we can see how a set of unreal people 
live as they lived in the dark ages, bearing no kind 
of relation to ourselves. Or if they advance a step 
beyond this, they still have a sort of Pompeian idea 
of Europe and Asia; for they look on them as con- 
taining many objects suitable for models of beauty 
and luxury in art or architecture, but hardly a thing 
which deserves to be copied in our real practical life ; 
a life in which they are fairly convinced no European 
can teach them anything. ISTay, can it be doubted, 
that there exists among us a still deeper, darker 
spirit of doubt, distrust, almost of hatred to Europe, 
which looks on the Atlantic as typical merely of the 
great gulf forever fixed between us ? If this feeling, 



ORATION. 35 

which I grant is very vague, were brought to an 
accurate definition, it would be that all but the lowest 
class in Europe were hopelessly opposed to us in 
principle; and that without a convulsion, to which the 
French Revolution offers no parallel, after which 
all that was left alive should at once model itself 
on our example, — we never can be in sympathy. 

JN^ow, fellow-citizens, such feelings may have a cer- 
tain lofty pride and freedom about them ; but they are 
wholly ungenerous,' wholly vuichristian, and certainly 
derive no countenance from the Declaration. That 
wonderful document does not isolate us from the 
nations, it sets us among them; — it recognizes a 
decent respect for the opinions of mankind; it tells 
us not to regard England and the rest of the world 
with distrust, suspicion and hatred, but as " enemies 
in war, in peace, friends." It is time for us to re- 
member these maxims, — it is time for us to cease 
looking at the old world from the wrong side. 
When we burst away a hundred years ago, we looked 
back at Europe with a scowl, and turned our faces 
steadily westward — we broke down the hard ground, 
and climbed the hills ; we spread over the rich plains, 
we toiled through the desert and up the eternal 
peaks ; and rushing down the golden valleys, at last 
we stand on the shore of ocean ; and as we still fix our 



36 JULY 4, 18 70. 

gaze westward, we find that tlie world is not an end- 
less plane, but a bounded sphere, and that the on- 
ward look from the new West only brings us back to 
the other side of the old East. Then, if we gaze 
clearly, without prejudice or prepossession, we find 
that after all, as both religion and science tell, we 
too spring from that m3"stic eastern world, whence 
every race of man has come. Then we shall learn 
that our fathers did well in setting us among 
the nations. We shall learn that the old world is no 
congeries of buried cities, no mere museum of ante- 
diluvian curiosities, but the real home of live men — 
men who know how to live: we shall find models 
there worthy of our imitation, not merely in the lux- 
uries of life, not merely in its pretty matters and 
playthings, but in real solid concerns of strength, 
progress, happiness; and finally we shall know that 
the great heart of Europe, from king to serf, beats 
with us and not against us. 

Fellow-citizens, this problem of the true relations 
of the United States to the rest of the world is at 
this ^moment forcing itself upon us. At this very 
moment we are in danger of refusing a gift which 
old Asia, the ever joatient mother of the world, is 
offering to the youngest of her children. When we 
placed flowers the other day on the graves of our 



ORATION. 37 

brethren in gratitude for their noble sacrifice, we 
could not help thinking what a terrible gap they left 
among us, and how all our difficulties at present are 
derived from the one want of men — men with arms, 
heads, hands — to fill, however imperfectly, the 
place of our lost thousands. The plenty that has 
come with peace is of no use. Our corn stands 
unreaped, our timber rots in the forest, our iron moul- 
ders in the mountain, for the want of men, men to do 
the work. At this moment a people of the old world 
— the most ancient, the most industrious, the most 
thrifty, the most ingenious, the best convinced of 
the value of education- — are crowding from their 
overstocked land to our doors, not as sturdy beg- 
gars, but as honest laborers, asking for work. Will 
you turn them away? Will you persist in refusing 
their help to make the national burdens lighter? 
Have you so poorly learnt the Declaration that you 
are going at this hour to take up the old cries of 
" race," and " America for the Americans "? Good 
Heavens! Ten years ago the IN^orth rose against 
the oppressions of the African — swore there should 
be no distinction of color, steadily refused to 
consider the question, "What will you do with 
the Negro?" and persisted, at the risk of national 
existence, in establishing that the black man was 



38 J U L Y 4 , 1 8 7 . 

as good as the Caucasian — and now comes the 
Mongolian, and asks to do the very thing you 
want done, and some of the very men who have 
declaimed loudest against distinctions of race and 
color talk ahout degradation from the contact. If 
you really mean to reject this timely aid that Asia 
oifers — if you really so construe the Declaration of 
Independence — then don't talk al)()ut acts of Con- 
gress to protect ship-building and encourage com- 
merce, but use your iron to make a high wall all 
round the frontier — plant a thick hedge of pine-trees 
outside — and retire to your lofty isolation. And 
perhaps, a thousand years hence, some travelling 
Chinese will break down the barrier, worse than his 
own great wall, and find the remnants of cities, as 
unintelligible as those of Central America, and as 
useless to the world. 

Ko, fellow-citizens, this would be copying China 
in the worst side of her character. JS'ot so is our 
national duty. Eather let us go on as of yore, 
throwing wide open our gates to all comers, and 
putting the Declaration into the freest and fullest 
practice. In. that case it can never be played out, 
hut every year will add new glories to its 
celebration. And so, when a hundred years hence 
a worthier orator, whom 3^on and I shall never 



O 1{ A T I O N . 39 

see, shall address our successors, — when Boston 
shall gather in her arms, from a circuit of a 
hundred miles, a population of a million and 
a half of citizens, — when two hundred thousand chil- 
dren shall throng her schools — when her libraries and 
museums, grown to tenfold their present size, shall 
still be bursting with their stores of art and litera- 
ture — when her harbor is crowded with five thousand 
sail, proudly flaunting the stars and stripes — when 
our ancient university shall count ten students for 
every one she now instructs, and show an income 
equal to her present capital — when the legislature 
shall sit but a single month in the year, except when 
detained on tunnel business, — when the directors of a 
network of railroads all over the state shall throng the 
State-house thrusting their surplus dividends into the 
hands of the state treasurer for investment — when all 
our hyperboles shall become less than the earnest of 
the prosperity of the United States — then, I say, the 
orator who succeeds me will claim it as the noblest 
honor of Boston that she stands between the old 
world and the new, — the advanced outpost of one, 
the rear-guard of the other, and the loved and 
cherished friend of both. 









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